The Big DumpTruck

Here's a little something I created yesterday. I'll post the other one in a day or two. You know, spreading out the love.

Labels: funny, movies, video

My son picked out a movie at Movie stop. I knew I wasn't going to like it because I've tried to watch it before, but really, there are two reasons this should be a good movie. 1: Mel Brooks can be funny. 2: Parodies amuse me.

However, the movie in question is Spaceballs and it's pretty much unwatchable. I say pretty much because every once in a while there is a line that in a funny movie would be fabulous. Like the line "What's the matter Colonel Sandurz? Chicken?"

Oh look, Mel Brooks showing off all his movies on VHS! Wait, there is a self-reference to the movie Spaceballs in the movie Spaceballs? I think some brain cells really and truly just exploded right now. Deep Hurting.

So to prevent extra pain from actually watching the movie, I think I finally got my new website running with a template I can live with, at least for now. Take a spin over to Photo-Gnome to see what I've been doing. Oh, and by the way, if you try to go there yourself, remember that someone else got the .com, I'm the .net (and the .info, but who is going to remember that, right?)

Labels: movies, photos, URL

As I may have mentioned here before (it's getting hard to differentiate between Facebook and Twitter updates and the blog itself, although anyone who reads the blog sees my Twitter updates over there on the right) Junior and I went to see the movie Paul Blart, Mall Cop because it was filmed at one of our local malls, the Burlington Mall in Burlington MA.

We FINALLY went back to the mall last weekend, after literally not going for months. We had intended to go right after watching the movie, but never got around to it (plus didn't have the money to go into the den of temptation).

So this will only be meaningful to folks who have seen the movie, but the rest of you can feel free to continue reading. One of the key things on our list was to figure out where Amy's cart was. We knew you could see a Zales in the background. That was easy to find. And while we were there we spotted a real Burlington Mall security guard on a Segway. You couldn't pay me ENOUGH to do that after the movie came out.

We were upstairs, and I said I wanted to go buy some ink for my fountain pen. Now there are technically 3 stores in the mall that I think could cover being the store that the dickhead guy worked at, but only one of them is a true "pen store" and that is Paradise Pens. I love love love that store, and it made me laugh that they made dickhead work there. As a family, we've spent hundreds of dollars in that shop, so I'm pretty familiar with it.

While buying my ink, I couldn't help but ask the clerk if the pen store was indeed supposed to be his, and he said the producers of the movie spent a lot of time in the store, and even bought a pen. It was likely the one that the dickhead gave to Amy to sign her check in the bank. There is a suspicion that the character might have been modeled after one of the employees, but I would never go so far to claim that, and I would deny saying so. But we have our suspicions that a teeny bit of this guy's personality made it into the movie. Heh.

All in all, a successful Paul Blart mission!

Labels: movies, shopping

It's sleep over night at Chez Dump. The regular cast of characters are present, including the gerbils and the dog. We're watching an MST3K movie. Good Lord, if I ever stumbled upon this on my own (the chances of which are slim to freaking none, given how horrible the damned thing is) I would only watch 3 minutes of it.
But as I'm sitting here, hoping for the best, and it occurs to me that if someone was able to convince someone else to put up the money to create this, someone could give me money to make a movie. It couldn't be any worse.
The movie in question is the Raul Julia classic "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank." A 1983 classic.

Labels: movies

I know that my many, many regular readers (all 3 of you) have been wondering where I've been. Just a little family thing involving surgery, but the patient is home and should be driving everyone crazy within a day or so, max. Also, I did live through a round of layoffs, but what happens is the remaining people get to divvy up the work of the people who are gone. You do the math. Oh, so all that stuff has also put me almost impossibly behind on NaNoWriMo. I will try to make up my word count this weekend, but I'm just not sure how well that is going to work.

Last night we checked out the upgrades Microsoft did to the Xbox 360 software, and decided to link up to our Netflix account. VERY easy to do, and boom, suddenly everyone in the house saw all the crappy movies I had placed in the "View Instantly" queue. Urp. "Why do you have a Scooby Doo movie in there?" "For Junior!" We watched a Pink Panther cartoon (from a collection) and the movie Underdog. There were a LOT of things that bothered me about the movie, but overall, I was not the target audience and it was really kind of cute. And hey, free with my Netflix membership, right?

Labels: movies, stuff

Netflix streaming for Macs was released as a beta. I am doomed. I will never finish my Nano Novel now. Curse you, Netflix!

The first movie I tested was "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." I believe that movie has the longest opening credit sequence in the history of movies. Five minutes of animated credits. Junior thought I was watching a cartoon. I watched 10 minutes before realizing that I shouldn't be watching a movie until I finish my NaNoWriMo word count for the day. Bad Jody!

Labels: movies, nanowrimo

Had fun at the North Leominster Little League annual banquet last night. It would have been fun anyway, but Junior getting 2 trophies plus a sponsor-supplied City Championship sweatshirt (thanks, Piper Electric!) was really icing on the cake. No, wait, the icing on the cake was winning a $50 Il Forno gift card during the raffle portion of the evening.

Junior had a great year. Can't say what next year will hold - there are a LOT of really good players in his age group, but they can't take the glory of the 2008 season away from him! Hopefully, he won't pull an "Uncle Rico" and spend the rest of his life dwelling on it, though... if I go 4 wheeling with my boyfriend and break something and ask Junior to take care of my grandchildren Napoleon and Kip, you have permission to shake me.



(So that raises the question - what happened to Napoleon and Kip's parents that they were living with their grandmother? Not that it matters - it's still one of the single greatest movies of all time. Somebody go build me a cake or something.)

Labels: baseball, movies

I got my birthday present a week early (well, one of my birthday presents, I'm sure, right honey? Right?)...I picked up a Flip video camera to use for the DumpCast. It's not the high quality one I want to fully replace the Sony that broke, but I didn't want to have to wait until this summer to have ANY kind of video camera device. The Flip was on sale at Best Buy and I also had a coupon so bargain city!

The first results of the Flip filming is available on the DumpCast webpage (or via iTunes). The second one is being fine tuned and will be up later today. That's two in two days. You can't beat that type of quantity, er, quality entertainment!

Let's just say that the first podcast features someone cheating at a game, and the second one summarizes our road trip to Maine. Cause if you can't make a movie about your road trip, well, what kind of movie director are you?

Labels: camera, movies, podcast, video

I only want a wintery mix if it involves peppermint candies and chocolate. Okay, that didn't make a lot of sense, but I got tired of trying to think of something funny. Maybe I should not have said anything then? I'll leave that up to you.

I'm going to try to take a little movie of what my Christmas tree is currently doing. It's blinking. But very slowly. It could blink faster but it's hugely obnoxious. I know because it was doing it recently. (We bought a remove on-off plug thingy that you can use to plug in three strings of lights and what it does is turn them on and off at different times so it looks twinkly, but we have a pre-lit fake tree so it doesn't twinkle, it just blinks like a crazy person.

Saw the movie "Enchanted" today - it was fantastic. Highly recommend this one, especially if you have any experience watching Disney Princess movies.

Here is our tree and the current fire. Note the soothing blinkage.

Christmastree.mp4
Christmas tree.mov

Labels: christmas, fireplace, movies, weather

Competition # 2 is tomorrow, so we need to carbo load, right? Right? Cause that's what you do before the big competition, right? You eat carbs because of some kind of thing your body does and it needs it, I guess.

I haven't figured that out because I was on South Beach and they said [bad] carbs are bad because they peak and drop really quickly. Oh, and then they stick to your hips and throw spitballs at you. So even assuming you carbo loaded whole wheat pasta (Ya, right), how is that going to help you 12 hours later? Wouldn't you be better off having a pancake breakfast that morning?

Also (as we cover a lot of important questions today), in the movie Shrek, don't Shrek and Fiona torture some frogs, by turning them into balloons? Minimally, that is because I can't remember what they ate roasted over the fire.

So when it turns out her father John Cleese was really a frog - where was the continuity person? I'm distressed.

Labels: food, legos, movies

I haven't uploaded any more of the 700 or so photos I took last week because, interestingly, the hard drive on my Mac became full. That causes two problems. I can't burn DVDs without having buffer space on the hard drive (a 4.7 gig DVD needs 4.7 gig on the hard drive, etc.) and moving things off the hard drive messes with LightRooms head, because it can't find files it previously imported. Oh, and you need buffer space on the hard drive to edit photos, too.

I picked up a 500gig external drive at Best Buy for $119 yesterday (tax free, on sale) and I'm moving things off the Mac hard drive slowly but surely. Actually, I have no idea how I filled up the hard drive that quickly. I mean, other than something simple like shooting approximately 10gig of photos in a week. Not counting all the photos I took before last week. Hmmm.

So while we wait for me to go through the rest of the photos, I'll take a moment to give quality feedback about last night's showing of Grease on Nickelodeon. I liked that movie a lot when it came out a million years ago. It hardly even bothered me that high school senior Rizzo was played by a 34 year old woman. Hell, Olivia Newton John was 29. John Travolta was 24. But that's not my complaint. My complaint (no, not the fact that "You're the One That I Want" is now stuck in my head) is all the smoking. This movie used smoking to show that the characters were "bad" and "cool" all at the same time. You know Danny's a bad-ass when school starts because he turns around from talking to three middle-aged high school girls and there's a butt hanging off his lower lip. I wanted Junior to watch this movie because I remembered it one way. But his first comment was "Why are they smoking?" Sure, it's set in 1959, and maybe smoking was actually allowed on campus back then, but good Lord, even Sandy pulls on a butt (amateurishly) in the final carnival scene to show that she's no longer a goodie-two-shoes. What the hell? And now that I'm an old lady myself, what the hell is wrong with being a goodie-two-shoes? Why can't we keep the Pollyanna version of Sandy and the lettermen sweater version of Danny at the end?

I still like the movie, and other than that (and the Rizzo pregnancy scare) it is a fun movie with good songs. And it's fun to show the boy what High School Musical was based on. But with someone smoking in literally EVERY scene of this movie, I'm questioning if it belonged on the Nick at Night lineup at 8pm. Call me a prude, but it was a bit much, even for me.

Labels: laptop, movies, Vacation

[This is a good test to see if my sister is paying attention.]

The other day we were at the new Best Buy in Leominster and I found a "bargain" video set that I bought to bring on our trip to the Cape with my sister's family. The last time we went down, in 2005, I brought down two collections of movies - 13 hours of 1950s and 60s Monster movies and another set of 13 hours of Sci Fi movies from the same era. That's some damned good entertainment. The boys became enamored of Gamera and some of the Sci Fi movies. One that comes to mind has the astronauts stepping outside of the spaceship with nothing to tether them to it, they just hover on the outside like they are standing on the ledge of a tall building.

This time I'm going to be bringing down 3 hours and 50 minutes of Classic Commercials. Oh ya, it's going to be a hot time in the old Cape House in August!

Labels: commercials, movies, summer, Vacation

My friend Andrea entered a contest to make a video for the Jonathan Coulton song "I Feel Fantastic" over at the PopSci (Popular Science) blog. She is not an animator, and I actually helped her out a smidge by forwarding a list of Mac animation software links. This is my only claim to fame related to her endevor.

She won the contest, and her fabulously fantastic video is available on YouTube.

Labels: friends, fun, movies, music

I sent Junior and Mr. Dump out to get some tulips for me on Saturday, to kill time while I was getting my eyes checked. (Some kind of infection, causing sight in my right eye to be blurry, making reading anything a horrific experience.) So when they came back to pick me up they had... a coconut. Oh. Okay. So no tulips, then?

On Easter Sunday, Mr. Dump and The Amazing Bob (shout out to long-time readers there, eh? That's dump material circa 1997!) worked with my dad to get the coconut open. Then The Amazing Bob and I got all the meat out of it. (We later grated it up, put it in the oven with some powdered sugar, mixed it with melted chocolate we got by double-boiling some Hebert's candy bars, making the worst-tasting coconut chocolate treats ever created on the face of the earth. My candy-making aspirations went down the drain, friends).

All of that hard work was so Junior could duplicate the horse galloping noises from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. God, I love that kid.

p.s. Oh, right, you saw tulips in Saturday's actual blog entry, right? I had to go back out with them and buy them myself. For some reason, they never saw the big container of cut tulips.

Labels: comedy, flowers, junior, movies